Having Fun with Embedded Gentoo on the TS72xx SBC

Hi everyone!

Having left Kiel last week and after a week of being back in Montréal doing some hard work, I've gotten my toolchains, overlays and binary package repositories for the TS72xx board to a very stable state.

I'm now using dropbear, openvpn, jamvm-1.5.1, classpath-0.97.1, and qmerge, thanks to the ease of building binary packages using Gentoo/Portage, xmerge, etc. Here are a couple of screenshots that can hopefully do justice to all of the work I've done with the 'compatibility' toolchain. The compatibility toolchain and binaries have been tested to be fully compatible with the kernel, libc, and so on distributed by Technologic Systems.








The toolchains, overlays, and repositories are for both arm-unknown-linux-gnu and armv4tl-maverick-linux-gnueabi. I've also updated the documentation on the Gentoo-Wiki:

Gentoo for the TS72xx (Old Toolchain)
Gentoo for the TS72xx Single Board Computer (Full Distro)

I had to fix the __NR_waitpid definition (removed it) in the linux kernel headers which solved a lot of glibc related issues I was having.

Next, I compiled busybox, etc, etc, got qmerge working on the board, and I've also compiled jamvm-1.5.1 and the classpath-0.97.1 . There was a slight problem with cross-compiling the GNU classpath shown below in the classpath bug.

One really strange problem that I had was with portage-utils. The md5sum code comes directly out of the busybox source code. The md5sum comman works perfectly on my board, but as is, the md5 calculations that qmerge made were always wrong. I didn't really want to spend too much time fixing the source code, so instead, I just created a patch for qmerge so that it calls 'md5sum' through popen. That fixed the problem, although the overhead is obviously very high. I should probably put in a patch since Ned Ludd, the original portage-utils author has been so helpful to me on the gentoo-embedded list. Thanks again Ned ;-)

I also noticed that busybox wouldn't reboot the system (using the older toolchain) so I had to make a patch which used the busybox-1.0.0 code for 'reboot'.

I'm hoping that some autotools / libtool genius decides to fix the classpath bug below, because I really don't want to spend any more time on it than I have to. The autotools should really _not_ abandon supporting cross-toolchains. There should really be a regular check made whenever AC_CHECK_LIB or AC_SEARCH_LIBS are made to see if the library location pulled from the .la file actually reflects the location of the .so or .a library in question.

As always, see my overlays for all patches to the original source code.

Some bugs filed:
Gentoo Bug #213690
Classpath Bug #35684